Mini-Update: Upcoming Changes (Patreon)

Hey Patrons! First and foremost, we wish you all the Happiest of New Years, and thank you for your continued support. On that note, we want to start this year as we did the last, by delivering killer new updates to you, our supporters. In this mini-update, we are going to give you a sneak peak at an upcoming change, to give you some insight into our development process and keep you up to date on things you can expect to see soon. This upcoming change is a complete Buffer Cache Rewrite (BCR).

This new rewrite has been developed in parallel to our recent texture cache rewrite, and similar to that, it intends to fix some longstanding issues you have reported to us over the past months. Some of these issues relate to graphical bugs, others greatly affect performance. But for this sneak peak, we are going to showcase just two of the many great improvements you can hope to see when this feature drops.

The first game we are going to be discussing, is a very popular Nintendo Switch title you may have heard of, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As the famous saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words", so lets take a look at the performance uplift we are currently seeing in our WIP development builds.

The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild exhibits a performance improvement of 50%+ in our Hyrule Castle Benchmark area:

The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild exhibits a performance improvement of 35%+ in our Hateno Village benchmark are:

Additionally, we have also solved a long standing bug relating to particle interactions in the Xenoblade Chronicles titles. Thanks to this fix, you will no longer experience extreme flickering of particles, clouds or fog in gameplay:

See the video

Further to this graphical fix, our initial testing shows a large increase in performance to all Xenoblade Chronicles titles.

In our benchmark area at the Bionis Leg, we see a performance increase of 66%+:

These examples are just a sample of what we have in-store, so expect to see a lot more as we edge closer to release.

As we stated, this Buffer Cache Rewrite is still in active development but we hope to have it released very soon (Mid January). Hopefully, this mini-update shows you that we are listening to your requests, and once again thank you for your continued support.

- The yuzu development team